When the company’s longtime IT
director turned in his resignation earlier
this year, Ryalls, who describes his
company as “just big enough that we do
a lot of complicated stuff and just small
enough that we don’t have a lot of IT
backup,” was initially very concerned.
But his worry subsided a bit when he
called his outsourced tech company to
let it know what had happened.

The company told him it would have
a team there on Monday to help out
with the transition. Eventually, Ryalls
opted to outsource all of the company’s
CIO functions as well as a workflow
management position, leaving him with
an in-house IT staff of two.

Creating Synergy

Bridging the gap between IT
and operations can help collection
agencies protect and potentially boost
their bottom line. Many collection
agencies will need to undergo a culture
change to ensure that IT and operations
are always communicating.

To provide value, IT must be
ingrained into every function of the
business. IT staff should be working
with operations management to
streamline call flows to get the right
account to the right collector at the
right time, or using information gleaned
from account scoring to brainstorm
ways to penetrate untapped consumer
segments. Above all, your IT staff
should be providing innovative ways to
get more money into the company—if
they don’t, it might be time to outsource
some functions or reorganize how your
IT is structured.

“IT needs a seat at the table,”
Langusch said. “If the owner and the
vice president of operations have a
meeting, the IT director should be
there too. If the response to that is,
‘IT doesn’t understand operations,’ the
answer should be, ‘Well, that’s the
problem, isn’t it?’” cm

Anne Rosso May is editor of Collector.

the true value of IT. What has IT done
to lower costs or increase revenue? If
your IT department is simply running
the most basic, essential functions of
the company—keeping the servers up,
maintaining network drives, etc.—

Langusch recommended sending some
functions to the cloud to maximize
efficiency and save money.

For example, taking IT to the cloud
can give small businesses enhanced
disaster recovery service, enabling them
to start competing for bigger clients.

“You don’t have to buy all this
equipment for your office anymore,”
Langusch said. “As long as your cloud
provider is secure and compliant
with applicable data security laws and
regulations, you can just put it in the
cloud, which will give you the same
capabilities as larger companies with
Knowing when and what to
outsource can be tricky, and often
depends on staff resources. Mike
Ryalls, president of RGS Financial
in Richardson, Texas, which employs
approximately 120 people, said the
percentage of IT functions his company
outsources has fluctuated over the years,
depending on its clients and staff size.

As Ryalls’ company grew, attracting
more clients with more sophisticated
demands, so did his IT department.
He divided the department to
separately address data functions and
hardware, which worked well for a
few years. Eventually, he realized the
company needed an IT director to take
responsibility for both the technology
and data sides. He promoted someone
internally to take over both functions and
manage the three-person IT team, and
outsourced the technology management
side—including the security and physical
management of the network.

“You can hire someone who has that
skillset and assemble enough people,
but it wouldn’t work from a profitability
standpoint,” Ryalls said. “It’s much more
cost-effective to go to experts on the
outside.”

1Put IT staff members through collector training or have them regularly shadow collectors tosee how they are using thecompany’s technology.2Implement ACA’s Professional Practices Management System TM or another auditingsystem to document whatyou do manually and whatyou automate. Have IT andoperations staff sit down todiscuss the results.3Evaluate whether IT has innovated and earned the company money, or if it is just keeping thelights on. If the latter is true,it might be time to outsourceyour IT functions or takesome of them to the cloud.Three ThingsYou Can DoTo Integrate IT